500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(35)
She sighed. That was very bad news indeed.
BUT LISSA DID that one thing. She muted her Facebook and Instagram accounts—leaving cheery messages to stop anyone from worrying about her—and removed herself from the conversation. She thought she would be lonely and miserable. In fact, instead—and with the occasional WhatsApp check-in from her good friends—she found it oddly freeing.
She didn’t really notice, but she started talking more to the locals, simply because she had no choice. Deirdre in the bakery; Mrs. Murray in the general store. And every day she’d swapped patient notes with Cormac, mostly brisk, but sometimes funny or odd. Irritatingly, he’d normally heard about anything that happened to her, including getting the car stuck up the dyke road, because apparently everybody knew you didn’t drive up the dyke road after a heavy rainstorm, but nobody had thought to mention it to her and it had taken half of Lennox’s lads to pull her out again. He’d also caught her up with how Mrs. Marks had switched to Turkish delight, believing it to be okay.
Seriously? Lissa had written back. Did you confiscate it like I told you?
Yes!
What did you do with it?
Nothing!
And then in the next email:
I am amazed, typed Lissa, that you had to become an NPL instead of a professional artist.
Me too, typed Cormac. An endless and disappointing loss to the art world.
What do people do on the weekend round here? typed Lissa. Have you got anything to do?
In fact, he did. There were people from Kirrinfief in London—not many, and it was his mother’s idea, which rarely boded well, as she didn’t speak to him that much. But on the other hand it was either that or literally nothing at all, sitting in one small room breathing bad air, so he’d said yes.
That’s very unfair, said Lissa. You have a ready-made social life in the greatest city in the world.
So do you. Just go down to the pub.
And make friends with wee Eck?
Well, that sounds like you already have.
Lissa signed off, and Cormac made a mental note that as put off as Jake had been before, it might be worth another shot. Meanwhile, he had the ordeal of a big London night to prepare for. He popped another piece of Turkish delight into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
Chapter 33
The night out wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Cormac’s mum, who did the Rotary club with Larissa’s aunt—although Cormac’s mum just helped out, and Larissa’s aunt, the very posh Tabitha, was the local grandee in charge, who handed out the prizes at the local pet show and chaired the ball committee. Bridie hadn’t forgiven her youngest son for ducking out of the army and taking a local job, but she wasn’t going to tell Tabitha this; in fact, she made quite the point of him going to London and hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, and wasn’t Tabitha’s niece there, and perhaps she could show him around, and Tabitha, who was a decent sort underneath it all and terrified of appearing a snob just because her brother was the Duke of Argyll, agreed and passed on Larissa’s details.
And, in fact, she’d caught her niece at just the right moment. Larissa was in an absolutely furious mood after being rejected the previous year by the local laird, Ramsay Urquart, who had, in fact, headed off with some guttersnipe nanny who’d inveigled her way sneakily into his pathetic affections—“Such a cliché,” she’d moaned to her friends, who’d all agreed with her strongly and said he couldn’t handle a strong woman with her own mind, and poured more fizz, and complained yet again about how shit all the men were these days, which was comforting.
She hadn’t seen a picture of Cormac—he wasn’t on Tinder, not that she’d been looking at it or swiping, and anyway Tinder was for absolute losers; it was kind of ridiculous, but they wouldn’t let her on Raya, which was a disgrace, all her friends agreed, which was also comforting. Tabitha said he had looked after her knee when she’d gotten it replaced and was quite the hottie, but Tabitha still thought Peter Bowles was the height of hotness, whoever he was, so she wasn’t going to take Tabitha’s word for it.
And it rather appealed to her to see someone from Kirrinfief. Let that get back to Ramsay, let him see how much she absolutely did not care and was not a snob or only after him for his title—as if. Who wanted that stupid crumbling house of his when here she was dating a nurse or something? So. Pleasing her aunt, of whom she was fond, and annoying her ex, and bringing a (hopefully) hot new man into her circle, and initiating some Scottish rube into what proper London sophistication actually looked like sounded entirely up her street, so she booked a table at her swanky London club and got lots of her girlfriends on board and got the fizz in and was in general in excellent spirits.
BY THE TIME Friday night came around, Cormac was absolutely exhausted from the driving, from the myriad different cases he now had—he’d never treated sickle cell disease in his life before, for example, and was studying up as fast as he could. He went for a pair of twill trousers he had bought by mistake online once, and never worn out in the village because everyone would laugh at them (they were a little tight, particularly down on the ankles), and a green-gray shirt Emer had bought him that she said exactly matched his eyes, which made him feel like a bit of a prick when he wore it, in case anyone thought that he had bought it for himself because it matched his eyes and because he thought he was terribly good-looking.